Posted on 04/18/2018 5:14:11 AM PDT by calvincaspian
Unless lawmakers can work a small miracle, a referendum question on raising the minimum wage will be on ballots in November.
Beacon Hill has limited time to get an acceptable compromise solution through the normal legislative process and avoid an expensive and contentious campaign on the issue. And the proponents of the higher minimum have the prerogative to reject any half measure they believe falls short of their goals.
The big player in this initiative is called Raise Up Massachusetts, a coalition that includes unions, community activists and clergy. Their petition would gradually raise the state’s minimum wage from the current $11 an hour to $15 an hour by 2022. It would also raise the hourly subminimum wage for tipped workers, such as restaurant workers, from $3.75 to $9 in that same period.
(Excerpt) Read more at bostonherald.com ...
Ultimately the endeavor is fruitless for the well-meaning, a temporary inconvenience for big corporations, unworkable for small businesses, bountiful for the unions, and terrible for Sheila.
Minimum wage has gone up many times and we’re still here. In fact, the economy couldn’t be better. Why not just raise it with social security every year. That would take it off the table as an issue for Dems.
Outlaw public sector unions and hang their leadership.
Why stop at $15? Make it $25 an hour, couldn’t hurt, right?
The true minimum wage is $0
0bamacare is the law of the land and we’re still here. The federal debt is several trillion dollars and we’re still here. There are several hundred thousand abortions severy year and we’re still here.
Exactly!
We’re on the cusp of the robotics dot com boom. Boston will be a big player in robotics start ups due to MIT and similar. The faster they raise the minimum wage, the faster robots take off. Unlike bio-robot imports, real robots don’t vote Democrat.
A 240% pay raise? You just gotta love union logic and unprofessional government employees who like to think they are in the real world.
Minimum wage is a price control, and therefore communist.
Besides all the usual ills, it has led to the illegal alien problem. FRers often blame companies for hiring illegals, but they are cheap under the table labor compared to paying the communist wage.
Get rid of the MW and the illegals will go away.
The government does not have the right to set an hourly pay rate.
Most of the time the MinWage has increased, it’s to keep up with inflation, and the increase has been small amounts. This particular initiative is intended to re-focus the MinWage from a pay floor for entry-level jobs into a so-called “living wage” i.e. pay at a level one could theoretically live on. It’s a near-doubling of the current rate. If your goal in life is to live on the pay of a supermarket grocery bagger, then you have bigger problems.
This is (as has been demonstrated many times already) going to gut small businesses and the entry-level job market. The kinds of jobs that this will affect aren’t worth paying $15/hr for. Not only that, but this will drive up the cost of many of the jobs that are just above entry-level. The grocery cashier or meat shop clerk now has to also get a pay raise in order to keep their pay appropriately proportional to the entry-level folks. People who worked their butts off to get that raise in the past are now going to feel slighted because the new guys are automatically getting what it used to take months to achieve. The business owners/managers are going to have to find a way to mollify those senior workers or face losing them. They’re also going to lose some of their low-end manpower (as already seen) because they now can’t afford to keep as many entry-level folks on the payroll. Their overhead has gone up, while revenues stay the same.
And that’s not even getting into all the new costs that unions will inflict on the economy.
This is going to go a long way towards killing whatever economic momentum Mass has been riding. They used to manage to stay ahead of their socialist tendencies, but they’re now well on the way to Californification.
Minimum wage: if you aren’t productive enough, the gov’t won’t let you produce at all.
So true about robotics! I had MIT grad students spend a few hours photographing tomatoes for a harvesting robot they were designing. We discussed the economics of farming and the tipping point for how much you can afford to pay workers (if you can find them), considering even the WF shopper is going to choose Canada over MA if the price is too steep. If they can design a robot for a reasonable price, we could replace at least one full time employee.
PLUS, let’s not forget that the $15 hike comes with the increased unemployment insurance, worker’s comp, payroll tax.....
Many jobs aren’t.
Gov’t debt at all levels is up & welfare numbers are up, trying to mitigate the consequences of dis-employing those whose jobs aren’t worth min wage pay.
Here’s a BETTER idea, govt\Leftist teet leech:
Open your OWN biz, pay YOUR employees whatever YOU think justified, as well as the bennies.
They may not have the right but they have the power.
And North Korea is still “here”.
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